Prof. Freeman Dyson was a visitor for two weeks at the University of
Washington, where I'm a member of the Physics Faculty. He presented a series
lectures dealing broadly with the problems of large scientific projects and
with strategies for success in such endeavors. I'd been in London during the
early part of his visit, but I returned just in time to attend his last
lecture, which was devoted to the past and future of the U. S. space program.
We also had a lively and wide-ranging conversation over lunch on the last day
of his visit. This column, based on this lecture and conversation, is a report
on Prof. Dyson's views on our troubled space program.

Freeman Dyson has a well-deserved reputation as a truly original thinker. He
helped to conceive Project Orion, a hydrogen-bomb-powered starship concept, and
his name is associated with the Dyson sphere, the ultimate solar-energy based
civilization. Whenever there are two conflicting opinions on a controversial
technical subject, be it disarmament, nuclear power, or construction of big
accelerators, Dyson can be depended upon to propose a strikingly original third
opinion, always logical and well-considered, which bears little resemblance to
either of the other two. In the case of the space program his views stand in
striking contrast to those of both the "Get humans into space at whatever cost"
camp and the "Dump manned spaceflight and do space science with machines"
advocates.

Dyson, who characterizes himself as a "hard-core space cadet", feels, in
essence, that men and machines both have their places in space, and that a
balanced scientific program of exploration and discovery must exploit the
strengths of both. He also feels that scientific priorities should rate far
higher in decision making than has been the case in any of NASA's manned
endeavors, from Mercury and Apollo to the Shuttle and the Space Station
project.

Dyson's lecture started by discussing "a path not taken", Werner von Braun's
bold 1952 proposal for a manned expedition to explore Mars. Von Braun
described a massive undertaking requiring 46 ferry vessels (shuttles)
transporting 37,000 tons of hardware into Earth orbit, where equipment would be
assembled to move 70 men and 4,200 tons of equipment into Mars orbit, from
which 50 men and 150 tons of equipment would descend in three ships on the
surface of the planet. The expedition would have used essentially WWII
technology, and von Braun estimated that it would cost "about as much as a
minor military expedition in a limited theater of war."

Dyson contrasted this dream with the realities of the Apollo project that came
to fruition 15 years later. Von Braun had naively specified a 1 kHz bandwidth
for the communication channel between the Mars expedition and Earth, a channel
too narrow for even voice communication. The Mars expedition would have
communicated by the equivalent of Morse code. By contrast, Apollo was designed
and executed in the glare of international television coverage and required a
communication bandwidth thousands of times broader.

Dyson characterized the Apollo project as a brilliant success precisely because
it was "conceived and honestly presented to the public as an international
sporting event and not as a contribution to science." This was symbolized
by the first item to be unpacked after landing on the Moon's surface, the
television camera. He observed that the landings, the comings and goings of
the astronauts, the explorations of the Moon's surface, the gatherings of moon
rocks, and the earth-ward departures all were expertly choreographed with the
cameras placed in the right positions to make a dramatic spectacle for
television.

Scientifically, however, Apollo was a dry hole. No big scientific surprised
came from the chemistry of the moon rocks or the magnetic and seismic
observations that the astronauts carried out on the lunar surface. It was no
surprise, either, that humans were indeed able to walk on the moon, to drive
moon buggies, to hit a golf ball, and to bring back moon rocks. The big
surprise of Apollo was the high quality of the public entertainment, and this
came at a high cost to science.

Dyson then speculated on how some hypothetical NASA with an active interest in
science might have structured the Apollo project within the same time
and cost boundaries to produce good science as well as good entertainment. The
main thing that was lacking in Apollo for good science was time. The 6
Apollo landings each placed 2 astronauts on the lunar surface for up to 3 days
with about 2 tons of supplies and equipment for life support and exploration.
For all of Apollo there were a total of about 50 man-days of lunar exploration
using a total of 12 tons of equipment. That's about 4 man-days of exploration
per ton of equipment.

That's very inefficient. Von Braun envisioned 130 man-days of exploration of
Mars per ton of equipment. Dyson suggested that 40 man-days/ton might be a
more realistic compromise. If half Apollo's lunar landings had been done by
unmanned freight carriers, each of these could have deposited at least 18 tons
of additional supplies on the lunar surface. That would have provided a team
of six astronauts with 60 tons of supplies and equipment, sufficient for a 400
day mission of lunar exploration. That comes to 2400 man-days of exploration
instead of the 50 man-days of Apollo.

With this much time, Dyson suggested, the Apollo project might have achieved
some significant science. There would have been time to explore the lunar
poles , to circumnavigate the body, to set up radio-astronomy dishes on the
Moon's radio-quiet back side, to take the time to investigate and theorize and
observe and test and probe. There would have been the time and opportunity to
bring into play those intrinsically human skills which have lead in previous
years-long voyages of discovery to new insights and understanding.

The real Apollo, of course, was carried out in a few days by test pilots
operating at a dead run, with one eye on the clock and the other on the
prime-time news schedule. There was simply no time for science. Dyson's
revisionist version of Apollo is another road not taken.

Dyson then turned from "the brilliant success of Apollo" to "the dismal failure
of the Space Shuttle". The Shuttle was supposed to be cheap, to be reliable,
to be easy to service and re-use, and it was supposed to be a frequent flier.
Above all, it was supposed to be safe. As it turns out, it is none of these
things. Dyson characterized the Shuttle both as a "turkey" and as a "lame
horse". A turkey in Air Force slang is a bird that can hardly fly. The
Shuttle is a turkey because it can only just fly into a low orbit. It has no
margin of safety, no extra capability for taking payloads to the higher orbits
needed by many scientific projects. It is a lame horse because as soon
as one problem is corrected, another problem appears.

Dyson remarked that the Shuttle is a prime example of the "Problem of Premature
Choice", a prevalent failing of government which he characterized as "betting
all your money on one horse before you have found whether she is lame". When a
project is sufficiently large that the "waste" of exploring more than one
engineering alternative becomes embarrassing to public officials, they find the
urge to immediately select one alternative and to kill all the others almost
irresistible.

Dyson suggested that such anticipation of nature is a fundamental mistake. The
evolution of science and technology is a Darwinian process of natural
selection. Public officials attempt to make the process "more efficient" by
short-circuiting the selection process, jumping the gun on nature's choices by
pre-selecting one of them, usually the cheapest. It is a paradox that the
secret of efficiency in natural selection is waste, the "waste" of providing a
number of alternatives that can be tested against one another in true
competition. The Shuttle lacked such competition, and our space program is now
suffering for it.

Dyson contrasted the Shuttle with another space project, the International
Ultraviolet Explorer or IUE. This little-known space observatory was launched
in January, 1978, using a reliable Delta rocket. The Delta, like the Saturn-5
of the Apollo program, has phased out by NASA management, killed to prevent
competition with the Shuttle.

The IUE, with mirrors and optics supplied by NASA, communication electronics
from the UK, and a solar power system by the European Space Agency, was
designed to operate in a geosynchronous orbit for about 3 years. It has now
been operating for more than a decade. During that period it has been used by
over 1000 astronomers and astrophysicists to observe for ultraviolet and
visible light the wavelength spectra of over 50,000 stellar objects, scientific
investigations that have resulted in the publication of over 1,000 scientific
papers. The IUE was in orbit when supernova SN1987A burst upon the scientific
community and had provided the most detailed and accurate light curves ever
measured for this rare stellar event. The Hubble Space Telescope, with 50
times the resolution of IUE and able to study 10,000 times fainter objects, is
still waiting on the ground for a working Shuttle to take it into orbit.

Dyson, having summarized the past 30 years of the space program, concluded his
talk with some guesses as to the shape of the next 30 years. He believes that
NASA's big and visible projects, the Shuttle and the Space Station, will from
the perspective of 30 years in the future appear as quaint and misguided
gargantuan ventures in the wrong direction, the von Hindenbergs and Titanics of
the late 20th century. He feels that the successful space activities of the
future will bear little resemblance to NASA's present long range plans.
Manned spaceflight will use new launch technologies that will make chemical
rockets seem absurdly inefficient. Most of the basic groundwork of exploring
the solar system will be done with "smart" space-faring probes exploiting the
emerging techniques of bio-engineering and nanotechnology. The space projects
of 30 years in the future will be as far ahead of today's IUE in sophistication
and information bandwidth as IUE is ahead of the von Braun's Mars expedition.

I've just returned from Vancouver, BC, where I was Science Guest of Honor at
V-Con. Dr. David Stephenson, a Canadian space scientist, remarked there that
each nation seems to play its own national game in space. The Russians play
Chess, plotting their moves with a strategy that looks decades into the future.
The Japanese play Go, systematically surrounding each technological territory
with their pieces until they make it their own. The Europeans play Bridge,
kicking a lot under the table while presenting a smooth performance above its
surface. And what of the USA? Well, in the 1960's we were playing Monopoly.
But now, under the present policies of NASA, we seem to have switched to
Trivial Pursuits ...

By the time you read this some 4-6 months from now, our democratic processes
will have elected a new president. He will, among other things, have to decide
what to do about the NASA problem. At minimum a new NASA Administrator must be
appointed, and perhaps the space agency will also be restructured as some
critics are presently suggesting. Will there be further plodding along the
dismal path that has lead from the triumph of Apollo to the Challenger
Disaster? Will the agency continue to place science far down in the priority
queue, going always for the Premature Choice and the job security of mammoth
engineering projects. Will NASA continue to withhold any investments in the
future, in advanced propulsion technologies, and in new ideas? I hope not.

I hope that the new President will choose carefully when making the decisions
on the new head for NASA and on whether to restructure the agency. The new
President can get advice from anyone he chooses. I think that he should have a
very long talk with Freeman Dyson.